What happened to your servers in Germany?

As part of our company’s longstanding principles and commitments to privacy, Private Internet Access has discontinued using LeaseWeb as a datacenter partner and will be relaunching its German exit gateway.

According to court documents, LeaseWeb allowed authorities in The Netherlands and Russia to sniff, or perform analysis, on internet traffic in 2008. Their objective was to perform deep packet inspection (DPI) on unencrypted ICQ messenger traffic.

Private Internet Access customers’ internet traffic is encrypted before leaving their devices using strong AES encryption (128 or 256 bit) and can not be decrypted by a sniffer or DPI equipment. Further, it is mixed among our users using a shared IP anonymiser before exiting towards the greater internet. An upstream attacker using a similar sniffer would only be able to see anonymised outgoing traffic. Since we do not log any traffic or session data, by design, and because we encrypt all of the internet traffic, no user privacy could be compromised even if subjected to a similar attack. Private Internet Access is designed in such a way that even if incoming and outgoing traffic is being monitored, individual users’ privacy will still be maintained. Furthermore, Private Internet Access has never had any servers in LeaseWeb facilities in The Netherlands or Russia. Our users were, are, and will always be private and secure.

Upon learning of these court documents, we have decided to disable our servers at the single Leaseweb location we were using and will no longer be doing business with them. Germany was the only region in which our servers were located in Leaseweb facilities, and they have been completely shut down as of June 11th 2017. We will relaunch our Germany exit gateway at another facility as soon as possible and have already begun the migration.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. We really appreciate the patience, and thank you for your continued support and helping us fight the good fight.